The Ethereum scam is detailed here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/3g5sk8/anyone_pay...
tl;dr it's a pretty standard premined altcoin scam. All the "smart contract" babble is a cover for the premined altcoin scam.
see also: Stellar.
tl;dr it's a pretty standard premined altcoin scam. All the "smart contract" babble is a cover for the premined altcoin scam.
see also: Stellar.
Investors who purchased Ether credits from Ethereum were in fact purchasing what amounts to equity in the Ethereum company.
If there was any doubt that this was illegal they went to great effort to create a Swiss company and then immediately dissolve it.
Kraken and the CEO Jesse Powell are accessories after the fact.
The whole project should be looked at by SEC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_funded_crowdfu...
$18,439,086 raised, yet no legal company exists, no filling were made, the programmers all have Eastern european names and everything in shrouded in mystery
but at least there is as sleek webpage to sucker people in like has happened with Stellar (how is that getting on?)
That's so financial advice, coming from the CEO of the Kraken exchange.
But as far as Ethereum itself being a scam... They raised money to produce a product and they've produced it. It's real. It exists. They've done what they said they would do. Whether it was worth the amount raised or not is fairly irrelevant at this point. They've delivered on what they promised.
The other day, there was a post on HN about a 'simple' example Ethereum contract, but it turned out to rely on lots of validators and oracles that 'would exist in the future'.
So, it's not clear to me that they've delivered on their grandiose promises yet.
That's at best a borderline slur and you don't need it to make your point.
HN is an international site, and nobody here deserves to be categorized based on their name.
The "premined" coins mostly went to the people who pitched in for the crowdfund. That was open to anyone and well-publicized, and the money went towards Ethereum's development. They hired about thirty people.
The "smart contract" stuff is real working technology, and it's the niftiest thing I've seen since Bitcoin. Ethereum is also the first production implementation of GHOST, which gives the same security with a 15-second block time that Bitcoin's algorithm gets with 10 minutes.
As noted above, there's a curious lack of evidence and that the example relies on handwaving https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10027569
Not every contract needs external data. A simple crowdfunding app, for example, doesn't need one. Hit the funding target by the deadline, forward to the fundraiser, otherwise return to donors. You can try out several sample contracts by going through the tutorials at ethereum.org.
The only reason oracles are complicated at all is that people don't want to trust them. If you're willing to trust a particular account for some purpose, it's trivial. Trusting a majority vote among several named accounts is also simple. It's the fully decentralized and low-trust solutions that may take some effort, but that's not an issue with Ethereum's core technology.